So color me surprised when many of them got sentimental in their reports on the Slow Media Experiment! In this assignment, students spent three hours engaged with analog media or other non-digital entertainments of their choice — such as watching VHS tapes, keeping written journals, playing musical instruments, listening to vinyl records and audio-cassettes, painting, sketching, making ceramics, etc.

As it happens, many of these college students missed middle-school-era activities that had been pushed aside as their lives got busier (in part due to increasing digital communication). Here's a small sampling of their responses to the experiment:

I chose to write in my journal because it is something that
I used to do every night when I was growing up and haven’t done since middle
school. I’ve always felt too busy or tired to sit down and write out my
thoughts after a full day at school or whatever it was that filled up my day.
Eventually I forgot about doing it all together. This assignment gave me a
reason to do it again after four years. When I was a kid, writing in my journal
was a special, almost sacred part of my day. It was a chance to be alone with
my thoughts. It felt so easy and relaxing. Writing in a diary is something
truly unique, and there is no digital alternative that can fully capture the
experience. There is something to be said for sitting down in a comfortable,
quiet place and writing out slowly and deliberately your every thought and
feeling.

First I practiced calligraphy, an art class that I am taking
in school. It's non-Western calligraphy, so we
have been practicing Arabic calligraphic work, which is very interesting. I
used a pen and ink to practice Arabic letters such as the S, L, J and B. The
advantage of doing these activities was that it caused me to be really engrossed
in what I was doing and I wasn’t really concerned with my cellphone or who
might be trying to reach me at the moment. Doing art was very therapeutic. I don’t
believe that you can recreate art with digital media tools.

Share this:

Like this:

For Edward Gorey, even letters to Mom featured whimsical illustrations from his morbid imagination. (Photo copyright Goreyography.com)

I found myself captivated this summer by an exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum of Edward Gorey illustrations
that included some exquisite hand-drawn envelopes for letters he had
written to his mother, Helen. Even more than the other beautiful, amusing and slightly macabre work
on display, those drawings got me thinking about the loss of material
artifacts that comes with digital communication and its insinuation
into every nook of daily life. Librarians and historians and curators
certainly must rue this turn of events, but so do I.

Digging
through my parents' garage, I recently unearthed a shoebox stuffed with
letters from an old long-distance flame of mine. Some day far in the
future, when I'm feeling nostalgic or working on my memoirs, I'll enjoy
reading those heartfelt missives and laughing (or cringing) at
reminders of the British life I used to lead. It's saddening that I
won't be able to do the same for my lovely and amazing boyfriend now,
because the flurry of romantic texts and e-mail and chat messages he
sends me aren't sitting safely in a box anywhere.

If a museum
ever mounted a retrospective on my life, the curators would be stymied
trying to exhibit anything after 1997-1998, when I sent my parents a
parcel of letters from Beijing that now serve as my main diary of that
Chinese escapade. (Note: The letters feature an unfortunate lack of
resemblance to Gorey's. I accepted the fact a long time ago that drawing does not count among my talents.) To represent the past decade, they'd have to
turn to my Facebook profile… and anyone could read that at home without heading
to the museum. Where's the fun in that? People would miss out on not only crystallizing moments — such as the Brandywine one, which led me to launch
this blog — but also gift shops.

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Search for:

I am an author, educator and researcher who examines alternative journalism, media activism, and popular culture. My book, Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable and Smart, is slated for publication by Oxford University Press in 2018.